too many stories

Rating: Null/10 (18 January 2010)

i grew up on this movie; my cousins and i would pile our GI Joes around the warm glow of the television to watch it on Sunday night and Monday night, since ABC couldn't show it all at one time... and we loved it. it gave us endless scenarios for our fearless troops to play out in the days to come, until the movie faded into memory (at least until the next airing!). then we got educated. we learned history, we read more books, we saw other films, and realized that not many of the men landing on the beaches were Robert Mitchum's age; not many Paratroops were John Wayne's age; most of them were barely out of their teens and not much older than we were in high school. it doesn't pack the visceral punch of the first 24 minutes of SPR, but it does cover MUCH more material in trade. i still watch TLD (i have it on VHS) but wish it could have been broken into more informative, fewer scenarios. i don't mind the odd cameos (Connery's was not truly a cameo; he still was a relative newcomer to stardom) and enjoy Germans speaking German.